@Peter Swinkels

reverse engineering is one of the stronges topics in software development - its very complicated and time consuming - you can spend month only on Alley Cats analysis
(btw: someone does that already: https://github.com/gabonator/Work-in-progress … sGames/AlleyCat)

1. Dosbox Debugger is the best debugger available for your case - it won't get more simple, i've used the Dosbox Debugger for several reverse Tasks
2. IDA or Ghidra are the best tools for what you want - and you will find nothing more simple - im also using these Tools and they are the best of its class
3. Even the simplest program is very hard to unterstand in pure assembler (without symbols and anything like that)

you should be an well skilled programmer, with a good feeling for x86 assembler, the DOS API, etc. - you should just stop
if you don't want to spend severals hours for even the smallest steps - reverse engineering is like that, there are no low hanging fruits 😀

the game seems to be not packed and IDA produces just ~7k lines of asm code/data - thats very very small (and all the resources included, for example the the stunts driving game results in 2MB pure asm code - without data)
what i would do:
-try to understand the format of the includes resources (sprites, images, etc.)
-find maybe wrongly as data defined code etc.
-start annotating the asm code, the drawing routines etc.
-reassembler the result of IDA to the very same EXE - to check if the disasm is 100% correct (use UASM and Unilinker/WLink for that, but you will need small fixes)
-get familiar with the Dosbox debugger etc.
-or just help gabonator with is reversing: https://github.com/gabonator/Work-in-progress … ed/cat_code.cpp (auto conversation of asm-code to pseudo-asm-c code - different syntax, same semantic)